Lead Linux Kernel developer Linus Torvalds announced the first release candidate (-rc) of the 2.6.24 kernel today, calling it one of the biggest -rc releases ever.

“Usually the compressed -rc1 diffs are in the 3-5MB range, with occasional smaller ones, and the occasional ones that top 6M, but this one is *eleven* megs,” said Torvalds in a mailing list post. “In short, we just had an unusually large amount of not just x86 merges, but also tons of new drivers (wireless networking stands out, but is by no means the only thing—we’ve got dvb, regular wired network, mmc etc all joining in), and a fair amount or architecture stuff, filesystems, networking etc too.”

The final 2.6.24 release is planned for the end of the year, and will likely include CFS group scheduling, improved support for containers, and possibly support for static probe points via kernel markers.